Museum Experience and Education The Museum Experience and Education department encourages audiences to access personal creativity and proceeds from the belief that innovation is a skill that can be inspired, nurtured, and developed through learning about the arts. Programs such as lectures, gallery tours, artmaking workshops, and free community days promote lifelong learning. SJMA provides ongoing arts education for school children, educators, university faculty, and college students. Programs are intellectually rigorous, boldly open-minded, and accessible to the diverse constituents of the Bay Area. Hallmarks of SJMA's welcoming environment are its participatory gallery activities, which are conceived in tandem with the curatorial and marketing departments to encourage deeper engagement with the exhibitions and to promote a sense of creative play.
Onsite Programs: School Tour Program Guided K–12 School Tours Guided tours focus on the careful observation and discussion of a limited number of thoughtfully selected objects. Lessons conform to the California State Visual Art Standards of Artistic Perception, Aesthetic Valuing, and Connections, Relationships, Applications.
Two-Part Art K–12 School Tours SJMA's premier field trip offering, Two-Part Art, encourages children to experience art as both viewer and maker. The program engages students with an hour-long, inquiry-based guided tour followed by a related hands-on artmaking activity led by an SJMA teaching artist. With grant support from the California Arts Council and Xilinx, SJMA was able to provide free Two-Part Art tours to 4096 students in Title 1 schools in FY19.
Kids' Art Camp Art Camps offer a safe, fun, and enriching adventure for children ages six to fourteen. Campers grow creatively and strengthen their artistic capabilities while developing social and intellectual skills. Camps culminate in public exhibitions of student artwork and approximately 350 visitors, including the young artists' friends and family members, all celebrated student creativity. Support from the California Arts Council allowed SJMA to provide offsite summer camp programming for students at two Title 1 schools (Grant Elementary and Horace Mann Elementary) in the San José Unified School District.
In-School Programs: Classroom Residencies Sowing Creativity Sowing Creativity is an integrated visual arts residency program developed by the San José Museum of Art to address the California Common Core State Standards and to meet the urgent need to promote creativity across disciplines. Sowing Creativity places the Museum's veteran teaching artists in classrooms for ten consecutive weeks of scaffolded art lessons designed to build creativity while introducing students to critical cross-curricular STEM concepts. The program responds to the longterm achievement gap in STEM subjects by using art to promote at-risk students' academic engagement with STEM at crucial "turning point" moments in elementary school. The program originally focused on serving third-grade students through an art and science curriculum. In FY19 the Museum rolled out a new fourth-grade art and math curriculum called "Show Your Work." It uses art to teach scale, proportion, symmetry, and fractions. This year the Museum also developed and beta tested the program's fifth-grade art-and-engineering curriculum. All Sowing Creativity students visit the Museum for an inquiry-based tour and a hands-on artmaking activity. 30
